Dead Channels

Great Article Here at PopMatters about outdated technologies and a sense of the uncanny that evokes Toffler, Ballard, Lynch, Gibson, et al. Author David Banash makes central the use of the static channel as laid out by Gibson's opening lines to Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I've never actually read Neuromancer, despite having a column named after another Gibson novel, but I find the metaphor Banash pulls up fascinating. It seems that it will be harder to engage the younger generation (particularly my newborn daughter's generation) in just how...unfinished...the world seemed when we were growing up. Television, not yet the stuff of 500 channels, had yet to be conquered. Gigantic, bulky, satellite TV, the dominion of the super-rich, promised exotic broadcasts from far and wide, but there was no schedule to it. In fact, in order to get certain channels you had to actually POINT your satellite (and before it, your antennas) in different directions. In this world, videodrome was out there somewhere, waiting to transform you into the new flesh. Things you had never even thought of were out there, just waiting for you to reach the right latitudinal destination. By contrast, in the era of digital cable, the platform is already laid out for you. All your options are there: 500 channels, nay 1000, and still nothing on.

Also notable in the history of dead television (or the ghost box) was the presence of scrambled channels, channels whose signal was blocked. These were broadcasts which required some level of arcane passage. Yet, at a psychedelic tilt you could glimpse inward at this restricted world and the resulting anamorphism was perhaps even more exciting. Will sex ever be as interesting to kids without the scrambled porn network? In the age of YouPorn, sex becomes less fantastical, more of a consumable than something that requires coded instructions and an intuitive level of understanding. No titilation. Instant pleasure. Negative jouissance.

Banash also makes reference to test cards, noting how strange they seem in retrospect, as he states in this powerful passage: "Often broadcast throughout the night, the test patterns seemed decidedly occult, charged with a kind of technological magic...the gaze of this Plains Indian seems almost mystic, looking to a spiritual rather than a material horizon, and so the figure becomes uncanny, disturbing. Most test patterns share something of this, and their uncanny power is, I think, much like Gibson’s image of static. The patterns marked a potential. They completed the broadcast circuit, but they utterly negated the banality of actual television programming. Instead, they simply made present the terrifying power of television, marked its presence—we are connected, something could appear. This is their utopian aspect—since they demonstrate the technological power as a pure form, the viewer of the test card confronts the sheer power of the medium without the reassuring or depressing banality of actual programming."

Interesting too that he should see the Indian head as looking to the future, when it is such a totem of he past. The sight of the Native American must always remind us of the world that existed in fine working shape before the European imperalists conquered it. Maybe, the makers of television were trying to convey this with their cryptic test card- that beyond the programming day lies the natural world, the world of the natives, a world that proves that all this virtuality is only a smokescreen. In the post test card era, is there anything but television left? Was there even a history that brought us here or a future to look forward to? I'd imagine dissertations could be written about that Indian Head alone.

I'm surprised he didn't make reference to the BBC test card of a girl playing tic tac toe with a clown puppet, more than likely the source of a generation's worth of nightmares.


Disturbing, no?

And reality television is perhaps the antithesis to the dead channel, the satellite dish, and the test card- an attempt at constructing a cognitive map of the existing world. Reality TV promises full coverage of the human condition as it currently exists, qualified only by the standards and practices laid down by the gigantic media conglomerates that own all of the 1000 channels. In reality TV, we can mistake living for "acceptable living". I mean, Mythbusters is a fine enough show, but where's the program called "Mythmakers"? Where's the Indian Head?